John Noonan writes for National Review Online about President-elect Donald Trump’s plan for America’s military leadership.

The Wall Street Journal reported … that the Trump transition team is drafting an executive order to “create a board to purge general officers.” Such a board, the article’s subhead warned, “could upend military review process and raise concerns about politicization of military.”

To the first suggestion, on upending the military review process, you will find no shortage of active-duty service members who say, “Hell to the yes.”

On the second, the Biden administration’s stewardship of the Pentagon — from throwing it into the abortion debate, to mandating force-wide diversity, equity, inclusion seminars, to promoting climate activism at the expense of real-world mission requirements, to quixotic campaigns to weed out domestic extremists, the list goes on — represents the most extreme politicization of U.S. military forces in modern history. Therein is the inherent challenge that Republicans face in the courtrooms of newsrooms — radical progressive policies are considered routine, but the act of removing those policies is considered inherently political and divisive.

I fear we may be returning to the toxic practice of “history began yesterday” reporting, in which every proposed action by a Trump administration is written as a tectonic, norms-defying event without precedent or historic rationale. But the act of removing bad or distracted leaders is a tool as old as war itself. President Lincoln went through several field commanders before settling on Ulysses S. Grant. Patton took over for Lloyd Fredenhall, whose failure at the Kasserine Pass in North Africa resulted in a catastrophic American defeat. …

… Perhaps the most relevant example here is that of General George C. Marshall and his “plucking” committee. This was the informal name given to a panel, not dissimilar to the one described in [the] Wall Street Journal, that Marshall established in 1940 to reform and modernize the U.S. Army leadership in preparation for entry into World War II. The committee aimed to replace ineffective or outdated senior officers with younger, more dynamic leaders better suited to the quickly evolving demands of modern warfare.